The current Puppies are very impressive to me. When I checked them out recently I have to say honestly first off I thought that not much has changed. But a lot has changed. Everything is so much more refined. Specifically the JWM/Rox desktop is smooth and powerful and easily configurable (using gui), just as the XFCE or LXQT desktops. No need to change anything. It's just it's been refined till it's just as smooth and usable as anything available. That's the surface, and the internals seem to have also been equally refined.
My interest here is in getting the highest quality playback from high bandwidth PCM files (flac 24/192) and from DSD (DirectStreamDigital, very high bandwidth PDM pulse density modulation files originally used on SACD). I have been testing with Bookworm and F96-CE. I have been using an ex-chromebook with the weirdness of 2 distinct soundcards, one for the HDMI and another for the headphones, speakers, and usb. This is not a problem many people will care about I don't think, playing these weird audiophile formats, but I know there are some of us. I found Bookworm and Vanilla DPup configured my weird cards perfectly and DeadBeef played everything I threw at it, but at 48K instead of their native bandwidth. So if you have no weird files, you're golden. F96-CE didn't configure both soundcards perfectly, so I could get hdmi sound but not laptop speaker sound. Both Puppies immediately recognized my Topping D10 Balanced USB DAC and configured it and played through it (just at 48 or 44K instead of high bandwidth).
In both Puppies, Deadbeef plays all of my files, the flac high-res PCM files and the DSF DSD files. But it plays them all at 48K. That's what it sends to my dac, which displays the signal bandwidth as it comes in. Deadbeef identified and displayed the accurate format and bandwidth of every track, so I think the down sampling to 48k came between Deadbeef and the output port (in pulse or pipewire). Of course this is all perfectly serviceable if you haven't contracted the AV, audiophile virus.
Some research told me that by modification to the pipewire config file I could get the proper bandwidth, that is, the original bandwidth sent to the DAC. I am sorry to be hazy here, but I didn't succeed. I might have gotten the right bandwidth from pcm but not dsd on a first test, but subsequent tests didn't work at all. Plus something was not right because the modifications to the config file seemed to break something, because in trying to shut down there was always a file open that didn't close and the background of conky didn't seem to refresh itself properly so it would be black a lot of the time. Somebody good with the config files should have better results.
That's as far as I went because I discovered Audacious. Audacious played everything just as it should. To be fair, before I changed anything it behaved exactly as Deadbeef did. But Audacious is very easily configured within the program itself and its gui. It has the most possible choices of output that I've ever seen. And I've always used foobar2000 because it gave me the most control. In fact I tried to run foobar2000 in wine to satisfy myself but it was a big mess and Audacious outperforms it anyway. I might even run Audacious on my windows machine. Audacious gives the choice of every option from "use system default " to "send it right to the hardware device without any conversions." And that's the ideal: no conversions, meaning no resampling or any other modification. Can you say Pristine? Oh yes, to get all this goodness out of Audacious I went to Settings - Audio and told it to use ALSA. Then the Settings button next to that gave me all the options. There's no loss here in functionality because the other audio programs such as YouTube over Firefox or Celluloid’s audio track for a video all play through pipewire just as it is set up. All in all though, if I was going to build a Puppy with what I considered the very best lightweight modern software I would use Audacious, if only for the ease and scope of configuration available within the program’s graphical interface.
To try Audacious, it installed smoothly with Synaptic Package Manager in Bookworm, and with Legacy Package Manager in F96-CE. Unless you are sending to a DAC that displays the bandwidth I don't think you can be sure unless you can hear a difference, which some people claim to be able to. I wouldn't be sure that I could myself because even a 48k file is cd quality. So in a way this was much ado about nothing, but I am happy.
This is the lines from pipewire config, in /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire.conf
## Properties for the DSP configuration.
#default.clock.rate = 48000
#default.clock.allowed-rates = [ 48000 ]
This was the recommended change
## Properties for the DSP configuration.
default.clock.rate = 48000
default.clock.allowed-rates = [ 44000 48000 88000 96000 176000 192000 ] , or also add 352000 384000
There is also a pipwire-pulse config file in the same place that might be helpful. Once the config file is changed it would be moved to /root/.config/pipewire/
Odd little detail, Audacious sends my DSD files to the DAC as 352k. Usually for those DSD files the DAC say d-1. I think this means that it is sending DSD over PCM DoP,, which is common in some systems that cant handle native DSD, such as Apple. There is supposedly no loss in this.
